KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Monday that his national security team has been receiving payments from the U.S. government for the past 10 years.

Karzai confirmed the payments when he was asked about a story published in The New York Times saying the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.

He said the aid has been "very useful, and we are grateful for it."

The newspaper quotes Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai's deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, as calling the vast CIA payments "ghost money" that "came in secret, and it left in secret." It also quotes unidentified American officials as saying that "the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan."

its so inspiring that the people who send us over there would rather keep throwing away money on stuff we dont need than consider the actual military's opinion on what the men and women actually fighting DO need. i understand you dont want to lose the jobs, how about making something else then? if they could make a chevy plant turn out god damn flying fortresses in 1943, why cant we have a tank plant building something needed at home in 2013? i'm sure the new tanks will be as useful as the other 25 thousand of them rusting in the arizona desert.

clips from article:

-Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.-If there's a home of the Abrams, it's politically important Ohio. The nation's only tank plant is in Lima.-The facility is owned by the federal government but operated by the land systems division of General Dynamics, a major defense contractor that spent close to $11 million last year on lobbying.-But the facility is still crucial to the local economy. "All of those jobs and their spending activity in the community and the company's spending probably have about a $100 million impact annually," Berger said.

So we're spending $436 million to bring $100 million to their community? Money is being tossed around and I bet somebody is making cash, including the dudes who get the $11 million in lobby bribes. This is a good picture of American politics. btw, article also mentions only 700 jobs in that plant, so I don't know what the big deal is. Retrain them to do something else or, as you put it, make them build something entirely different.

But leading lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), also uniformly stressed on Sunday talk shows that they didn't believe the U.S. should send American troops into Syria to confront Mr. Assad. Both lawmakers and the Obama administration are wary about U.S. involvement in another conflict in the Middle East after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Granted, who knows what would have happened had he been president. To add...

Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) said on the same show: "I believe the United States could play a greater role in dealing with the humanitarian crisis…I don't think the world's greatest superpower, the United States, can stand by and not do anything."

I wonder how Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, feels we should go about addressing the crisis.

Except that boondoggle project is wasting hundreds of billions of dollars instead of mere hundreds of millions. Also, I think the Abrams actually does what it’s designed to do, unlike the F-35, which mostly fails to do what it's desgined to do and in many cases is worse than existing designs.

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.

The Citizen Hearing on Disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race will attempt to accomplish what the Congress has failed to do for forty-five years - seek out the facts surrounding the most important issue of this or any other time.

It seems a bunch of ex-legislators are getting paid ~$20k a piece to sit on this committee.

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.

Mr. Paul reminded the surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was ultimately discovered by a civilian, and not due to police crackdown, Politico reported.

“He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police,” he said. “And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.”

I heard Limbaugh going bananas about this the other day. The kid was one block beyond the police lockdown with a bullet hole in his neck; he wasn't going anywhere, they would have found him. And it's not like private citizens did all the sleuthing and apprehending; they still called the cops. (Ooooh, evil state!)

tifosi77 wrote:I heard Limbaugh going bananas about this the other day. The kid was one block beyond the police lockdown with a bullet hole in his neck; he wasn't going anywhere, they would have found him. And it's not like private citizens did all the sleuthing and apprehending; they still called the cops. (Ooooh, evil state!)

Has it been 'proven' that he suffered the GSW to the throat before the boat was riddled with 200-300 bullets?

I've been curious about why the police shot that boat full of holes when they had him trapped inside it. Maybe there was a reason but I haven't heard it.

(And lets not get into a discussion about him being a terrorist who had killed and maimed citizens and was accused of shooting a cop. At the point at which they identified his body in that boat, he wasn't an immediate threat, unless he fired from inside the boat or screamed that he was going to blow everyone up - which I haven't heard)

tifosi77 wrote:I heard Limbaugh going bananas about this the other day. The kid was one block beyond the police lockdown with a bullet hole in his neck; he wasn't going anywhere, they would have found him. And it's not like private citizens did all the sleuthing and apprehending; they still called the cops. (Ooooh, evil state!)

Point is... the best form of protection is, always was, and probably will always be, a vigilant public. There is no power better than numbers...

tifosi77 wrote:I heard Limbaugh going bananas about this the other day. The kid was one block beyond the police lockdown with a bullet hole in his neck; he wasn't going anywhere, they would have found him. And it's not like private citizens did all the sleuthing and apprehending; they still called the cops. (Ooooh, evil state!)

Has it been 'proven' that he suffered the GSW to the throat before the boat was riddled with 200-300 bullets?

I've been curious about why the police shot that boat full of holes when they had him trapped inside it. Maybe there was a reason but I haven't heard it.

(And lets not get into a discussion about him being a terrorist who had killed and maimed citizens and was accused of shooting a cop. At the point at which they identified his body in that boat, he wasn't an immediate threat, unless he fired from inside the boat or screamed that he was going to blow everyone up - which I haven't heard)

Nothing has been 'proven' yet, but he had lost a significant amount of blood when he was picked up and most outlets I've read say that all indications are that the throat wound was self-inflicted. No gun was recovered at the scene, however, so if it was self-inflicted he did it sometime between the overnight shootout and the boat shootout.

And as far as why they riddled the boat with hundreds of rounds, the reason I've read is an officer saw the tarp lift up and thought something was coming out of it (like a gun or a bomb) and he opened fire with one shot. The rest of the officers on the scene heard that one shot and thought it was coming from the boat, and so everyone within 30 yards of the boat opened up until the cease fire was ordered.

Regardless, that's a lot of bullets leaving guns and not making holes in bad guys.

Pitt87 wrote:

tifosi77 wrote:I heard Limbaugh going bananas about this the other day. The kid was one block beyond the police lockdown with a bullet hole in his neck; he wasn't going anywhere, they would have found him. And it's not like private citizens did all the sleuthing and apprehending; they still called the cops. (Ooooh, evil state!)

Point is... the best form of protection is, always was, and probably will always be, a vigilant public. There is no power better than numbers...

While I do not - in any way - disagree with your sentiment, that is not how it was being presented on the radio.

He had some very strong words to say about it yesterday, words that would have served him well, oh I don't know, between 2009 and 2012. We'll see if they rhetoric is backed up by any substantive action.

Suicide bombing was mostly rejected In the study by the Washington-based Pew Forum, but it won 40 percent support in the Palestinian territories, 39 percent in Afghanistan, 29 percent in Eygpt and 26 percent in Bangladesh.

Over three-quarters of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia want sharia courts to decide family law issues such as divorce and property disputes, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said on Tuesday.

Views on whether women should decide themselves if they should wear a headscarf vary greatly, from 89 percent in Tunisia and 79 percent in Indonesia saying yes and 45 percent in Iraq and 30 percent in Afghanistan saying no.

Majorities from 74 percent in Lebanon to 96 percent in Malaysia said wives should always obey their husbands.